How is the Story Progressing?

As I sit down to write this, I thought the title might refer to two things. First, I am working on my next book, trying to have it ready for January or earlier. Second, I was thinking about the challenges of my own life as if I were the protagonist of my own, unwritten story. Thinking about my progress, in both of these, I’m doing pretty well, sometimes.

For my next book, I have carried on in the outline I started for Resonance. I just published the second book in that series, Dissonance, and now I’ve begun writing the third book. I plan to have that third book done by January. Some of the items that were hinted at in the first two books will come to the forefront in this third book. Wyatt, the protagonist, will face his toughest choices yet. I’ve outline the third book, still untitled, and have written the first six chapters.

As I outline and write my books, I’m constantly thinking about the challenges in my own life. I’ve spent a lot of time here discussing my stress level at work and ways I work through it. I think learning to work through those challenging times is key to happiness. My day job brings a lot of stress because of the deadlines and multiple tasks. The stress never ends. All I can do is work through it. When it gets to be too much, I step away, if only for a moment. Writing on my lunch breaks, in the mornings, and in the evenings helps me relieve the buildup of stress.

Like a protagonist in a good story, I’ve gone from reacting to the challenges around me to being proactive. Now rather than just expecting things to fall apart, and waiting for the backlash, I find myself watching for small adjustments I can make. Not so much to prevent everything falling to pieces, but to prepare to fix it faster. Just like any good book, as the story nears the end, the protagonist must act and not react.

Check out my books A Map, a Mage, and a Sacrifice,  The Promise of Dust, and Progenitor’s Legacy: Deceit, which are all free on Kindle for the next few days, beginning today.

Dissonance, my sequel to Resonance, went live on Amazon Kindle and as a paperback on September 3, 2021. In that book, time travel is tearing the world apart, and only those that sense the resonance can feel the changes. Wyatt, Brooke, Aldan, Jeremy, and Avery, have to determine who to trust as they look for the source of the changes. It is a sequel to Resonance, which is my best performing book on Amazon, so far.

My fantasy, A Map, a Mage, and a Sacrifice, was a fun book to write. It is set in a world with limited technology, but where sacrifice is a necessary element to magical power. The greater the pain and suffering, the greater the magical power generated. The few mages in power use voluntary sacrifice of the citizens to generate power they use to protect and defend the empire. But their rule may be coming to a close.

If you’re looking for a science fiction story, try my book The Promise of Dust, which takes place in a cloud city floating in the atmosphere of Venus. Or Progenitor’s Legacy: Deceit, which takes place many years in the future on a tidally locked world that orbits a red dwarf and has been reached by humanity in their search for the alien progenitors who seeded the galaxy with nano machines.

If a young adult science fiction is more to your liking, check out my series This New Earth, that starts with Demons of a Dead World and Secrets of a Dead World.

If you are looking for a young adult fantasy, check out my book The Threads Unbound.